北京pk10彩票官网 www.bjn98.com Legal observers were surprised by the relatively light, 47-month sentence received Thursday by President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted in August on charges of tax and bank fraud.

The 69-year-old, who appeared in the court in Virginia in a wheelchair and pleaded for compassion, could have been sentenced to up to 24 years in federal prison.

With time served, Thursday's sentence means Manafort could spend a little more than three years behind bars for this case.

"As a former prosecutor, I'm embarrassed," said NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner, speaking Thursday on MSNBC. "As an American, I'm upset ... I am just as disappointed with Judge Ellis. It's an outrage and it's disrespectful of the American people."

Former federal prosecutor Laurie L. Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said, "I'm somewhat surprised."

"This is so much more lenient than what the guidelines would be," she said. "Manafort’s personal plea and frail condition probably did make a difference."

Democratic Rep. Eric Swallwell of California responded to the light sentence with irony, saying on "All In With Chris Hayes," "I think I spent more days in detention in high school than Judge Ellis thinks that Paul Manafort should spend in jail for what he did to defraud the United States."

Many other observers highlighted the disparity between punishments for white-collar crime like Manafort's and street crime.